The button box is a Jackson family heirloom, and every single button in the box has a story behind it. When Beverley Jackson becomes confined to a wheelchair after a road accident, Gran gives her the box so Bev can use the stories to occupy her mind and cheer herself up whenever she is feeling down. Bev knows all the stories by heart (she must have a photographic memory or something) and every week she dips into the box for a story to tell. The stories have accumulated not only over the years, but the centuries as well – and they are still growing as Bev makes her own additions from her assorted holidays, friends, teachers, penpals, and even celebrities. Some new additions are being made even as an episode unfolds. In these cases the narrator is the donor, who is telling Bev the story before donating the button to the box.

The buttons come from all walks of life, social classes and cultures across the world and centuries. Therefore the buttons can be used as vehicles to explore a multitude stories that are set in a whole variety of backgrounds, cultures and eras. Since people of both sexes and all ages use buttons, readers get a multitude of different types of people starring in a Button story, including soldiers, beggars, teachers, celebrities, performers, lovers and even a boy or two. The buttons are also educational. For example, readers get snippets of information about the history of buttons and the things people used to do with them. Among them are the game of “touch buttons”, from the bygone days when kids played with everyday items, and charm-string buttons, which were popular with American ladies in the 19th century. The person to add the last button to the string and finish it was the husband-to-be.

A number of the buttons are directly linked to Bev’s family history. The Black Glass button tells the story of how her grandfather and grandmother met; the Black Op-Art button does the same for Bev’s parents. If Bev gets married, no doubt there will be yet another button to tell that tale. The very first button story, that of the Broken Pink Button, tells readers that Bev’s gran wanted a sewing kit for her sixth birthday but her mother said she is too young for it. Gran proved otherwise by sewing the pink button on her cardigan. Sure enough, she got the sewing kit for her birthday. During her birthday party the button got broken, but grandmother keeps it as a “precious memory”.

The buttons tell stories to entertain, educate, inspire or chastise, but nearly always they have a moral of some kind. For example, many buttons tell rags-to-riches stories, such as the Coin Button and Imitation Jewel Button. In these cases their owners kept the buttons to remind them of their origins and keep their feet on the ground. Pity coachman Billy Lowe of the Coachman’s Button tale didn’t do that. Lowe marries into the nobility and becomes so arrogant he turns into a monster. Then, when he is given a coachman’s button (a shopping muddle) it reminds him of his coachman origins and thereafter he wears the button inside his sleeve to keep reminding himself. Bev’s friend, Prue Holt, who has overheard the story and realised she let her own good fortune go to her head, starts doing the same.

Even when a button starts as a mere novelty item it ends up teaching the very message it exhibited as a novelty. One is the Liar Button, which is inscribed with the words, “YOU LIAR”. It is a novelty button but it was actually used to punish a girl who told lies to impress her friends. The T Button is simply a button inscribed with a letter “T”, but it became attached to a story featuring “T’s”. Tara is nicknamed “The Tomorrow Girl” because she is an habitual procrastinator. Then Tara gets a shock when she thinks she has put off one thing too many and become indirectly responsible an accident. Fortunately it turns out to be a false alarm, but Tara resolves to become “Tara the Today Girl”.

Bev is only too happy to give buttons away to people who need them. The Walnut Button which Bev gave to a newcomer named Tara is unusual because the button came into her collection with no known story to tell, but left her collection with one: “The Cracking of Tough Nut Tara”. Tara is so affected by grief that she freezes up and refuses all offers of friendship to avoid further hurt. On her birthday, when the only presents she has received are from her parents, the tough nut finally cracks, realising that she has only made herself even more miserable. Bev takes pity on Tara and gives her a special birthday card with the walnut button sewn on to make a point about what a tough nut she has been. One can just see Tara showing the walnut button to another girl who is rejecting friendship and telling its story to her.

Other buttons tell stories of inspiration, courage, and even equal rights. The motto of the Ladybird Button is “never give up”. The Dog’s Nose Button is an instruction in overcoming stage fright, which Bev uses to buck her mother up when she is nervous about giving a speech. Southpaws will cheer the story of the Daisy Button. In the 1920s, Lena Brown loves sewing but hates her school sewing lessons because the teacher keeps forcing her to sew right-handed although doing so makes her sewing suffer. The teacher is silenced when Lena wins a prize for sewing a blouse left-handed after breaking her right arm.

There are heaps of buttons that warn against judging on appearances. The Volcano Button tells us not to underestimate people who seem shy. The Rusty Raincoat Button and Snake Button warn against intolerance and not being hasty to judge people just because they seem different.

On a related theme, some button stories leave you thinking about something in a different light. The Warden’s Button reminds us that traffic wardens are human beings just like us; they just do an unpopular job. If you think Girl Guides are stuffy and uncool, the Guide Button will have you thinking again; its story relates how a lost dog was reunited with its owner thanks to guide training.

Button stories about kindness and generosity being returned manifold are one of the most popular themes in the strip. For example, the story about Austrian “Tinies” Buttons is about a selfish girl who learns to share her toys when she sees what a poor girl has for a toy – a lump of wood done up as a doll. And if you think you are not talented at anything, the story of the Imitation Jewel Button teaches you that if you are kind, you have the greatest talent of all.

The Acorn Button and Ivory Buttons teach environmental messages, and you could say the Barrel Button has a message about recycling. When a friend is about to throw an old barrel on a bonfire, deeming it useless, Bev stops her with the barrel button story to demonstrate how useful a barrel can be. In the story, a water barrel helps save the day when an American pioneering family is hit by rustlers. The barrel gives its name to the frontier town that springs up soon afterwards.

Even when the button story conveys no explicit moral, one can still be implicit. For example, Bev tells the story of the Eye Button to entertain a child, but we can hear a moral in the story: think outside the box. Nina’s dream of becoming a nurse is shattered because she does not meet the physical requirements. Nina’s parents advise her to set her mind on something else, but she cannot. Then, when Nina uses an ‘eye’ button to mend a toy, an astute neighbour spots the solution. Through her, Nina does become a nurse – at the dolls’ hospital. The Eye Button is one of the button stories on how some of the buttons got people launched on new jobs and careers.

One of the more amusing button stories is the Mattress Button, and its story of how greed (and not caring for your relatives) brought its own punishment. A grasping couple are waiting for their uncle to die so they can seize the fortune he has stashed somewhere. What they don’t know is that the money is hidden in his bedroll – which they have just thrown into a bonfire!

Not all the button stories come from Bev’s collection. She collects button stories during visits, holidays and public exhibitions. A golf club exhibits buttons that were specially made to promote equal rights for women golfers. A priceless dress decorated with pearl buttons is being auctioned and the pearl buttons carry another rags-to-riches story. The Button Church gets its name from three silver buttons given by a poor girl because they were all she had to give. The buttons become an inspiration for the vicar when the church is bombed during the war and has to be rebuilt. The three silver buttons are set in the wall of the church, reinforcing Christ’s message of giving all you have.

Since we have a disabled girl as the star of the show, it is not surprising that a number of the buttons tell stories about the disabled. One example is the Star-Shaped Button. When Emma Drake goes blind she spends a whole year brooding, calling herself a “useless cabbage,” refusing to help herself and spurning her parents’ every attempt to buck her up. Finally, Emma changes her mind when her enhanced sense of feel leads the police to the robber who burgled the house. Bev gives the star button to her friend Alison to give her confidence in starting blind school.

Perhaps the best button story of all is the Salvation Army Button, which is reproduced above. This story even prompted a letter to Tammy. The button’s appearance is dull, but Bev considers it her brightest button because the Salvation Army brightens lives, as it did for Milly Hawkins, the daughter of a Victorian beggar-woman. After being orphaned, raised in a cruel orphanage, turned out to learn her own living and finally driven to the brink of suicide, everything turns around when a retired Salvation Army officer gives Milly her jacket. Naturally, Milly joins the Salvation Army.

The Salvation Army Button may have brightened lives, but there are buttons in Bev’s collection that have actually saved lives. For example, the Soldier’s Button is about a World War I soldier who is dying from his injuries. His buttons save his life: they reflect moonlight and get him spotted by friendly locals. The Horn Buttons (made from the hooves of cattle) save the life of a tearaway boy who has got himself into one scrape too many: he is dangling by his braces and could plunge to his death unless those horn buttons live up to their promise.

The only thing missing from the button collection is the supernatural. However, Alison Christie said in an interview that she intended the strip to end with Bev regaining the use of her legs while reaching for a button, implying that there was something supernatural about the buttons all along. If this ending had been used, it would most likely have been in Tammy’s final issue before her merge into Girl. However, it never happened due to Tammy’s sudden disappearance after 23 June 1984 from a strike. The last published Button Box story appeared 16 June 1984 and was a regular story. No Button Box story appears in the last published issue of Tammy.

Douglas Perry is an artist whose style will be recognized by most readers of girls comics as he has had a very prolific history of drawing for IPC/Fleetway and for DC Thomsons across many decades. I think of him as a Jinty artist because he drew two particularly striking serials for this title, and a number of Gypsy Rose stories too. In fact however the bulk of his artistic output was clearly done for other titles, particularly IPC’s Tammy and DCT’s Bunty.

As my particular memories of Douglas Perry are from his spooky stories in Jinty, I want to illustrate this post with some pages from 1978’s “Shadow on the Fen“; they show his distinctive style (loose but effective) well, and give a chance to shiver at the creepy atmosphere he brings to life.

You can see from the above that Perry’s art has a lot of movement and energy in it, with some lovely touches in the composition, like Rebecca’s hair breaking the boundaries of the panel in the last page.

The Fate of the Fairleys (1982-83) ‘Het geheim van Bella Vista’ in a Dutch edition of Debbie Parade Album from 1985 or 1986

“T for Trouble” (1985 Annual)

‘Sally on Planet Serbos’ (1985)

‘Trapped in time’ (1986)

“The Seven Sisters” (c1988)

“Little Miss Lonely” (c1988)

“The Trouble With Boys” (1989)

“I’ll Never Forgive You!” (1989)

“A New Life For Lily” (1994) ‘Lotje’s nieuwe leven’ in Dutch Tina 1994

“Lonely Lynn” (1994)

“Stop, Thief!” (1995)

“The Impostor!” (1995)

“The Seeker” (1996-97)

“Shivery Shirley” no date available

These items were taken from a discussion thread on the Comics UK Forum and added to by Marc in comments below

Mandy

“Go Girl Go” from the 1971 Mandy album

Dutch translations with original titles unknown

‘Billy MacGuire, hoofd van de clan’ [‘Billy MacGuire, head of the clan’] (Dutch Tina book 1981), original unknown

Een hoofdrol vol gevaren! (1987, Dutch Tina)

See also this discussion thread about him on the Comics UK Forum, which includes some example art uploads. The Girls Comics of Yesterday site, which focuses on DC Thomson titles, also has a Douglas Perry tag. Here is a Catawiki tag list too.

I am sad and surprised to see how little information there is available about this fine artist on the internet. There is nothing on Bear Alley, or the UK Comics Wikia entry, nor even anything on Lambiek’s Comiclopedia. I suppose we must count ourselves lucky that Perry drew for Tammy during the years they were running credits.

As ever, further information (particularly in order to add to the Bibliography) would be extremely welcome.

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Edited to add: Mistyfan has sent through scans of the Misty story that Perry drew: “The Chase”. It is a great spooky tale and I include it here to show more of his artwork.

Herbs of Life (Uncle Pete spooky story; artist Shirley Bellwood) – originally printed in June & School Friend, 4 July 1970 (source here)

Jill In the Dark (artist Carlos Freixas)

Seal Summer

Spiky and Otis – gag strip

A Chip On Her Shoulder (Uncle Pete spooky story)

Dora Dogsbody (artist José Casanovas)

A Call for Help (text story)

Star Performance (text story, illustrated by Terry Aspin)

Heroes of the Wreck (prose non-fiction)

The Jinx From St Jonah’s (artist Mario Capaldi)

The Pooh Stick Game (text story, written by Lindy Gale)

The Nodding Mandarin (Uncle Pete spooky story)

Curse of the Cat Goddess!

The Bells of Karlok (Uncle Pete spooky story, illustrated by John Armstrong)

The Truth… and Mandy Martin

Nurse, please help me! (text story)

Do-It-Yourself Dot (artist Alf Saporito)

A Christmas Dream (text story, illustrated by Trini Tinturé)

This doesn’t strike me as the strongest annual I’ve ever read, though some of that feeling may be down to the lack of many of the usual strong Jinty artists. There are a good number of strange stories, which I always like, and some solid text stories, but nothing very outstanding in any of it.

The first story, about a mystical plant that will bring happiness to the finder, has a desperate girl who wants to find it so as to make her mother well, and a rival bitchy girl who only wants to enrich herself. Of course the good end happily and the bad unhappily – but I do wonder what illness the girl’s mother could have that ‘only an expensive operation could cure’ that she wouldn’t be able to get on the NHS? It sounds rather like plot taken from the heyday of girls school stories rather than a 1970s story.

Other readers may well be more interested than me to read “Jill In The Dark”, illustrated by Carlos Freixas who I know has many fans. I like his work in other stories, and it is very nicely done, but there is a preponderance of melodrama both in the plot (girl runner finds herself going blind at unpredictable points, has to struggle in the absence of friends and family) and in the art (lots of shots of the eponymous Jill staring in panic as she struck by sudden blindness).

(click thru)

There are at least a couple of good solid Jinty standbys in the shape of “Dora Dogsbody” and “The Jinx from St Jonah’s”. Dora sees household hijinks as Mrs and Mr Siddons dress up for a fancy dress ball as Dick Whittington and a cat respectively – including Mr Siddons being ordered by his missus to get onto the floor and miaouw at the cheeky mouse who has frightened her! In the end Dora gets to go to the ball and Mrs and Mr stay at home, nursing nasty colds. And in Katy Jinks’s story, of course she is the one causing the upsets and shenanigans, if inadvertently as ever. There are lots of trips and spills, and much outrage is caused, only to end happily for all. They are both nicely-judged stories with a light touch and a feel-good factor.

As ever there are also various quizzes and articles about possible careers for the reader when she grows up, and things to make and do. I include a scan of one of the quizzes below because it is illustrated by an artist I am particularly fond of, who I would like to know more about. Does anyone know the name of this artist at all?

Spooky storytellers. The storytellers who bring you a spooky tale of mystery, creepiness, paranormal, magic, fantasy and even horror every week. Often there was a moral in it, with girls learning about courage and confidence, paying the price for bad behaviour, or some other lesson or experience they will never forget. Spooky storytellers were extremely popular mainstays in girls comics, and a spooky storyteller was guaranteed to last for years and even decades, as the Storyteller who brought us The Strangest Stories Ever Told proved. The Storyteller went through three comics – School Friend, June and, finally, Tammy. Other spooky storytellers included The Man in Black from Diana and Skeleton Corner from Judy/M&J. And Jinty had Gypsy Rose (no relation to Gipsy Rosa Remembers from Diana). ‘Gypsy Rose’s Tales of Mystery and Magic’ debuted in Jinty on 28 November 1977.

Gypsy Rose, as the name suggests, is a gypsy woman whose Romany understanding of the supernatural, not to mention her wanderings as a gypsy where she can encounter adventures in more distant places, brought an extra advantage to her stories. And from the beginning, Gypsy Rose showed us that she was going to break the conventional mould of the spooky storytellers in several ways. First, while most other storytellers were older people with a parental or creepy look to them, Gypsy Rose was a young woman. Second, Gypsy Rose not only told us the story but was often a story character as well, somewhat like DC’s Madame Xanadu. While she opened some stories with a panel to open the story and then a concluding panel to round it off as other story tellers did, she also took an active role in other stories as a supernatural consultant who has been called in for advice. This was only natural as she was a gypsy, who was expected to not only understood the supernatural but have powers of her own as well. The only one we really see is Rose consulting her crystal ball to answer a client’s query. The other is how, whenever she is called in, she always seems to know the story behind whatever is plaguing the consultant and able to tell them what is going on. How she knows is never revealed, though we do see her doing research in a library occasionally.

As Rose often acted as a supernatural advisor, her stories were set in the present and centred on ghosts, curses, strange happenings, and evil objects, places or people. For example, in ‘The Box of Hate’, one girl comes to Rose saying that she is being blamed for strange activities that are destroying her guardians’ shop. Rose comes along, traces the problem to a box which is inhabited by a poltergeist, and has the box buried. In ‘The Haunted Ballerina’, another client comes to complain of a malevolent force emanating from a mirror that she has just bought. It seems to be out to destroy her dancing career. Rose tells the client that the mirror is haunted by a jealous ballerina who hated to see others dance because she could not do so following an accident. The evil ends up destroying itself. We never see Rose fighting evil with exorcisms, magic charms or spells, though in one story she urges an angry god to stop chasing a girl who took a bracelet from a sacred site.

Whenever Rose was an actor in her stories, it brought one drawback – they had to be set in the present. There could be no period settings (except in flashback or in one case, time travel), science fiction stories, or fantasy stories dealing with mythical beasts and such, as could be done in the Storyteller stories as he merely narrated the story, not acted in it. So story material was limited to supernatural-based themes. Only in stories where Rose was the narrator could there be more diversity in the themes explored.

By 1980, the Gypsy Rose tales were all reprint. Some of them were reprints of her own stories, but others were reprints of old Strange Stories from Tammy and even June, but replacing the Storyteller with Rose. As such, she was now more a narrator than an actor and consultant. This did have the advantage of bringing more diversity to the story material. We began to see more period stories, fantasy and even a bit of science fiction. It also enabled artwork from non-Jinty artists such as Giorgio Giorgetti, John Armstrong and Diane Gabbot to appear in Jinty and give readers a taste of these artists. On the other hand, a fallback on reprints is never a good sign for a comic. All too often it reflects cost-cutting measures and/or that the comic was declining and approaching cancellation. Indeed, Jinty would merge with Tammy the following year.

After the merger, Gypsy Rose was rotated with the Storyteller in the spooky story slot until 17 July 1982, with the launch of a new-look Tammy. Her stories in the merger were new material and not reprints or recycled Strange Stories as they were in Jinty‘s final year. When the new-look Tammy appeared, spooky stories continued but their narrators disappeared – even the long-running Storyteller.

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Here is the first Gypsy Rose story, “The Ring of Death”, from Jinty and Lindy 29 January 1977; art by Jim Baikie.

List of Gypsy Rose stories in Jinty (incomplete, to be added to as issues are posted)